Made in L.A.

The Filmmakers

Director Statement

The project started with a quite different goal: One day I read a newspaper story about sweatshops in Los Angeles. It talked about the deplorable conditions faced by immigrants working in some downtown garment factories: long hours, sub-minimum-wage pay (or no pay), unsafe or unsanitary conditions, rats, roaches ... I simply couldn’t understand how this was possible. I was appalled. I had already made a short documentary, and so I set out to make a little film that would expose these issues and that would take about five months to complete. Or so I thought.

I approached L.A.’s Garment Worker Center, then newly opened, and started spending time there, sometimes filming, often just talking with workers. They were about to launch a campaign against a clothing retailer: a boycott and a lawsuit that would attempt to hold a retailer — Forever 21, which sells trendy clothes at cheap prices — accountable for the conditions where their clothes are made. The energy of those early days was electrifying, and I filmed everything that I could. As I started to get to know the workers, I was struck by their need to tell their personal stories. Stories of why they came to this country, of why they were doing garment work, of their hopes and fears for their children. They seemed surprised that I wanted to listen.

The five months that I had planned to devote to the project passed quickly and yet I felt that I might only be at the beginning. As the film began to grow, I sought out collaborators and met my producing partner, Robert Bahar. Through our invaluable collaboration, we began to reshape the film from a little documentary on sweatshops to a feature story focusing on the lives of three of the amazing women I encountered at the center: María Pineda, Maura Colorado, and Guadalupe “Lupe” Hernandez. I filmed them at home, at the noisy protests with their children, at meetings at the Garment Worker Center — virtually everywhere they’d allow me to follow them. I was so dedicated that Lupe used to tease me: “Little camera, one day you’ll leave me alone!”

If Made in L.A. were to accomplish anything, I would hope that it would provide a deeply human window into this oft-repeated struggle of immigrants. Wouldn’t you leave your children, no matter the danger, no matter the pain, in order to send back enough money to feed them, hoping to give them a better life? Wouldn’t you work day and night, no matter the physical and emotional drain, if you had four children to raise and you had no other options? And wouldn’t you overcome your fears and stand up one day to demand your rights in the workplace if you were constantly humiliated, underpaid, even spat at? What would you do — or not do — in order to survive?

Struggles cause people to change, and as the campaign dragged on, we were amazed to observe each woman’s growing sense of self-confidence and self-worth, their agency and empowerment. It then became clear to us that this was the real story and that their struggle against Forever 21 mattered not just for its own sake, but because it served as a catalyst for each of their individual stories. The story of María taking control and deciding to leave her husband. The story of Maura learning to cope with her fears and struggling to reunite with her children. The story of Lupe, who grew up feeling ugly and insignificant, becoming an organizer and one day reflecting on her path from atop Victoria’s Peak overlooking Hong Kong. Made in L.A. is a story about the decision to stand up, to say “I exist. And I have rights.”

I am humbled and honored to have been allowed to capture this on film. Like María, Maura, and Lupe, at the end of a long journey, we all got something that we had never expected.

— Almudena Carracedo

Almudena Carracedo, Producer/Director

Almudena Carracedo along with Robert Bahar directed Made in L.A., a feature documentary that tells the story of three immigrant women’s transformation as they fight for their rights in Los Angeles garment factories. The film premiered on PBS’s P.O.V. series in a co-presentation with Latino Public Broadcasting and won numerous awards, including an Emmy, the Henry Hampton Award and the Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism. Made in L.A. screened internationally at 85 film festivals and was the subject of an innovative community engagement campaign that led to more than 600 community and faith-based screenings that reached 30,000 people directly, in addition to the nearly two million people who viewed it on television.

Prior to Made in L.A., Almudena directed the short documentary Welcome, A Docu-Journey of Impressions, which won the Sterling Award at Silverdocs. Born and raised in Madrid, Spain, she is a 2012 Creative Capital Fellow, a 2012 Sundance Time Warner Documentary Fellow, a 2010 United States Artists Fellow and the recipient of the ESTELA Award from the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP). She was recently honored by Illinois Wesleyan University with a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, in recognition of her work. She has served on IFP’s Advisory Board and has been a mentor at NALIP’s “Doing Your Doc” series. In addition, she has served as a juror at several film festivals, including Silverdocs and Santiago's International Documentary Festival in Chile, and currently teaches documentary at NYU Madrid.

Other ITVS Work

Robert Bahar, Producer

Robert Bahar co-directed Made in L.A., a feature documentary that tells the story of three immigrant women’s transformation as they fight for their rights in Los Angeles garment factories. The film premiered on PBS’s P.O.V. series in a co-presentation with Latino Public Broadcasting and won numerous awards including an Emmy, the Henry Hampton Award and the Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism. Before Made in L.A., Robert directed and produced the documentary Laid to Waste, and line-produced and production managed several independent films including Diary of a City Priest which premiered at Sundance, and Pittsburgh, starring Jeff Goldblum, which premiered at Tribeca. Robert is a 2012 Creative Capital Fellow who has served on the Board of the International Documentary Association and he co-founded Doculink, an online community of 4,000 documentary-makers. Robert has guest lectured at USC, UCLA, Columbia, and the Jacob Burns Film Center, among others, and currently teaches documentary at NYU Madrid. He holds an M.F.A. from USC’s Peter Stark Producing Program, which he attended on a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship.